If you’re after a well-crafted machine, adorned with a range of features from a media controlling touch panel to the old favourites eSATA and ExpressCard/54, then Acer’s Aspire 5940G could well fit the bill. There’s even a fingerprint reader, a 4-pin FireWire 400 port and a whopping sub-woofer.
Aspire 5940G
Home entertainer …

COMMENTS

Subwoofer

I see a lot of laptops are coming with subwoofers these days. I'm curious as to how the vibrations affect the HDDs in these machines?

The 8 inch Aspire one had problems with its internal speakers vibrating the HDD and causing hangs (although obviously not on the flash HDD models) so how do they isolate the HDD in these media station laptops from sub bass wobblings?

Paris becaus I could be being very dumb and overlooking something obvious

ACER - forget them - warranty not honoured

ACER cannot be trusted to honour it's warranty, by personal experience, and even for a commercial customer. And we were dealing with a countries corporate office not through a dealer.

Their 'extended' warranty - something most laptop users should have - has so many exclusions to make it nigh on worthless.

A rubber foot fell off, my country typically has summer days reaching 35-40C. Do they have spares? NO! You have to buy a whole new base cover - hardly a reasonable thing to do. (Rubber feet are excluded from any warranty coverage).

Given that they glue aircraft together you would have thought ACER could make feet permanent attachments.

ASUS, however, do replace feet which is why the corporate office now has 163 ASUS computers.

A job for trading standards

You have an automatic right to assume that electronic equipment will work for at least 6 months from getting it, and in some cases your reasonable expectation that equipment will work extends for about 5 years after purchase; a year is probably reasonable for a laptop. If anything fails in this period you have a prettty automatic right to a repair or replacement, and if not given you should be talking to Trading Standards.

Here. have some fecking letters and/or digits

"mobile CPU with a TDP of 45W comes at a great cost"

This is true, but it is a great TDP for a low to midrange server though. Why is it so hard to find a motherboard with a mobile cpu these days? You used to be able to get them a few years back but they seem to have dried up. All I want is a box with a lowish thermal footprint that I can run 24/7 without creating an excitingly high power bill at the end of the month. It doesn't need to be super grunty but does need to have VT extensions and support more than 2G RAM

I currently run an Atom 330 box but it doesn't have VT and is artificially limited to 2GB by those knob ends at intel. Honestly, why bother adding 64Bit instructions to a CPU which you won't allow to be paired with any more than 2Gb RAM anyway?

Because regular chips aren't much higher

Compared to the 840 (the only one likely to ever reach 45W) the 860S isn't really much higher. And if you lock it to a certain maximum, either in the BIOS or with one of a number of multiplier-tweaking tools for Windows or Linux, you get the same power output. By locking a 970 even lower, you get even more out of it at the same TDP, but those are insanely expensive and the power savings will never add up to the cost difference. Once the 32nm parts come downlevel just a little more, they would make much more sense for servers than mobile parts.

iirc, the boards for Dothan or Merom were only being made up until Conroe was widely available, since Conroe could likewise be equivalently clocked down.